The Way a Shocking Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – Fifty-Eight Years Later.

In June 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her sergeant to review the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her Bristol home in June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandmother, a woman whose first husband had been a leading trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, twice widowed but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.

There were no one who saw anything to her murder, and the initial inquiry found few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Officers canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case remained unsolved.

“Upon realizing that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” states the officer.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in forensically sealed bags with barcodes. These were not. They just had old paper tags saying what they were. It meant they’d never undergone modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It resembles the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found culpable of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

A Record-Breaking Investigation

Covering fifty-eight years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel tangible,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too risky,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith entered the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in safeguarding involved demanding hours. When she saw a vacancy for a crime review officer, she decided to pursue it. “It looked really interesting, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Evidence

Smith’s job is a non-uniformed position. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at historical crimes – homicides, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review active investigations with a new perspective. The original team was tasked with gathering all the old case files from around the region and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally arriving at the archive,” says Smith.

Those boxes, their contents now properly secured, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in innovative manners,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a notification that forensics had a complete genetic fingerprint of the rapist from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got a follow-up. “They had a hit on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”

The suspect was 92, widowed, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was a full team effort.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team pored over every single one of the thousands original accounts and records.

For a while, it was like navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photographs, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would usually be different. There are so many generational differences.”

Understanding the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a big character,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, estranged from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. She had a gaggle of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was amiss.”

Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Vast quantities of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also interviewed the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had been at the crime scene. “He remembered every particular from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘I’ve been a doctor all my life and seen a lot of dead bodies but that’s the only one that had been murdered. That stays with you.’”

A History of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a cushion,” says Smith. Both women fought back. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

Smith was present at Headley’s arrest. “I knew what he looked like, I knew he was going to be 92, and I also knew how compelling the proof was,” she says. The team feared that the arrest would trigger a medical incident. “We were uncovering the darkest secret he’d kept hidden for 60 years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by family liaison. “She had assumed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is massively underreported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many elderly ladies would ever tell anyone this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would spend his life behind bars.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “With current investigations, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the conclusion.”

She is confident that it won’t be the last solved case. There are about 130 cold cases in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other leads. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”